Computer Surgery

I did something of the Christmas holiday that I am proud of, computer surgery. A little before Christmas my parents bought a new HP desktop computer. At the time, my father was a little reluctant to decommission his old IBM Thinkpad laptop. This was a good decision in time. On Boxing Day, a little before I headed out for my 10 mile race the computer stopped responding. My initial thought was that it had gone into Windows stand-by or sleep mode or Windows was acting up. The problem would have to wait until after the race. I called HP technical support and we suspected it was a hard drive problem or the computer’s power supply. A couple of days, later a new hard drive came by UPS and the recovery DVDs came by FEDEX. We replaced the hard drive and the computer was unresponsive. I called HP again and they thought it was a problem with the power supply. The next day a new power supply arrived and we switched all the cables. With a new hard drive and power supply the computer started up and started to purr. It would take about an hour for the recovery DVDs to be processed. But it was a good feeling to head back to Ottawa knowing that my parent’s computer was working again.